Ten Things #14
GH on the T20 World Cup, Gillon McLachlan, ghost signs and premature burials....
1/ The T20 World Cup is still on, if not for much longer. But let’s savour its topsy-turveydom.
2/ A few days ago, it was all about the smooth-running Australian machine, pace bowling to burn, Zampa in excelsis, Warner in emeritus mode etc. Now it’s not impossible that they could miss the semi-finals, after slipping up against Afghanistan in St Vincent. They strangely decided to go with the trend of the tournament rather than the ground and send Afghanistan in, and were chasing the game from the point that Ibrahim Zidran and Ramanullah Gurbaz added 118 for the first wicket with positive but sensible cricket. Their fielding was reprehensible, their batting reckless, the margin of their defeat emphatic. Cue an actual earthquake for a cricket match in Sensurround.
3/ It’s a shock but not a surprise, really. Afghanistan match up against us well on slow surfaces, and their batting has come a long way since roly poly Mohammad Shahzad was slogging it and the captaincy changed every other week. If not for Maxy, they’d have rolled Australia at Wankhede Stadium in November. When first I wrote about the promise of cricket in Afghanistan back in February 2012, I wondered why Australia, a country with soldiers in the country in support of the government, did not exploit cricket’s diplomatic potential. Of course, we subsequently withdrew those soldiers, ceded a hard-won outpost of democracy back to the Taliban, then had the nerve to withdraw our bilateral cricket recognition when the Taliban did what the Taliban do. The issue remains live, even if I remain unclear quite sure why cricket needs to redeem the failure of forces far, far larger than itself, and what our disapproval accomplishes given squishy liberalism’s track record against sadistic theocracy. Be that as it may, chalk another one up for Mother Cricket, who’s having a big tournament, and also gave a belated pat on the head to Afghanistan’s coach. Ten years ago Australia, to all intents and purposes, ended Jonathan Trott’s batting career; by playing so carelessly Australia have hugely enhanced his coaching reputation.
4/ Cricinfo offers the scenarios, weather the unknown factor. With the Indian Premier League’s eclipse of the West Indies’s traditional season, Caribbean cricket has been pushed later into the year, where there is greater danger of weather interruption. There is extra time available for the semi finals and a reserve day for the final, but little room to manoeuvre for tomorrow’s Australia v India game.
5/ Some people seem to have enjoyed my Offsiders drive-by on flop-haired, born-to-rule corporate robot Gillon McLachlan. Certainly, to paraphrase Stewart Lee, they agree the fuck out of my take on sports and gambling - that sport is being used for gamblingwashing, putting its happy, wholesome face on a cause of great human misery. This is nice, but all I’ve really stated is the bleeding obvious, and what I scribbled hastily on my run sheet actually omitted an important component, which is government, every bit as addicted to revenues from gambling as sport and sports broadcasting.
6/ It must be twenty years since I was called by Andrew Twaits, then a bright young general counsel at Cricket Australia. What would I think, Andrew asked, were CA to take a betting partner? I replied that I would think it was shit, especially given cricket’s recent misadventures with corruption in the sub-continent - sport was much better off at arms-length from hot money and social evils. Andrew thanked me for my views, CA duly took the first of many partners, and Andrew, a nice chap, went off to run Betfair. It’s curious that CA still favours empty, windy gestures like moral posturing about the Taliban, but thinks it can hold its nose while profiting from gambling. The difference is, I guess, that there’s a buck involved. To quote Jefferson: ‘Strictly speaking, the more money, the less virtue.’
7/ The first Black Flag gig, shortly after the release of Nervous Breakdown, was at the Moose Lodge in Redondo Beach: ‘After the first set, a drunken Keith Morris was accused of disrespecting the American flag by lodge members and was given the boot, but he put on a wig to play the second set. It shouldn’t have worked but it did.’ From Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records by Jim Ruland.
8/ Thanks to fellow ghost sign enthusiasts who since last week have proffered favourite examples. This, from my confrere El Scuzzo, is my fave, on the south side of the building at 150-152 Glenferrie Road, Malvern, revealed four years ago by the demolition of adjacent former Commonwealth Bank building. Apparently Louis William Holmes was so keen to show his handiwork that the entirety of the text reads:
L.W. HOLMES,/HOUSE PAINTER & PAPERHANGER/ON SALE/GLASS FOR WINDOWS & PICTURES/VENETIAN BLINDS RE-TAPED & PAINTED/ON SALE/CARRIAGE VARNISH/WAGGON VARNISH/COPAL VARNISH/RUSSIAN GLUE/ENGLISH GLUE/GOLD PAINT/MACHINE OIL/PIPE CLAY/CHEAP SIGN WRITER/HOUSEHOLD/PAINTS 5D PER lb TIN/ESTIMATES FOR/GENERAL REPAIRS.
Holmes was seventeen years a Malvern councillor, and also served a mayoral term. The business, passed from father to son, lasted about six decades, and merged into an ironmonger. And his cheap signwriting then vanished again, sealed up behind a new construction, for the delectation of generations to come.
9/ Speaking of premature burials, perhaps my favourite sports story of last week was of the AFL, perhaps confusing him for Noam Chomsky, killing Hawthorn legend Michael Porter. When reports of Porter’s demise proved to be exaggerated, the AFL perpetrated the further falsehood that they’d contacted him to apologise. Initially a league spokesman said: ‘Once this innocent mistake was realised we moved quickly to ring and apologise to everyone affected, including Michael, and thank him for his understanding.’ Except they hadn’t: “I read today that the AFL said that they had actually spoken to me and they haven’t. They made a mistake and then they’re saying “oh we’ve contacted him. He understands” but they haven’t contacted me.’
So unlike the AFL to fuck something up then lie that everything’s sweet. The BCCI of football.
10/ Still, these episodes are less uncommon than you might think. Cricket geeks like me rejoice in the tale of the Rev Archibald Fargus, who won a Blue at Cambridge and represented Gloucestershire before World War I, then was listed among the missing after the loss of the armoured cruiser HMS Monmouth at the Battle Of Coronel. Wisden, the game’s recording angel, published Fargus’s obituary in its 1915 edition, unaware that he had missed his train, and thereby missed his ship’s departure. At least the almanack, suitably abashed, corrected the record, but they then missed his actual death in 1963, and did not print a second correct notice for Fargus until eighty years after the first. I also have a dim recollection that the ‘curmudgeonly thespian’ A. E. Matthews read reports of his own death in The Times, and was subsequently reported to have said: ‘I read The Times every day and if I don’t see my obituary then I go to work.’ Hoping you don’t read your obituary today….
"Gambling is, as smoking was, a slow-acting poison that uses sport to mask its taste." Thank you Gideon. Hope that features on a ghost billboard somewhere near everyone soon. Better still, running on the electric ad banners stadia in between the ‘Bet Now!’s. Crowdfund?
Great Ten, Gid. (Post responsibly.)